Alistair,

My pet cat recently died. What is the best way to bring Mowsers back from the dead?

Grieving in Key West

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Grieving,

Ordinarily I would tell people to let their dead pets stay dead. Trying to resurrect a deceased animal is most often an unspeakable nightmare of red tape. As it happens, however, cats don’t have souls. Almost every other creature – from cockroaches to manatees – have some sort of primitive Soul OS. Cats just don’t. Spiritually, they’re undead; a slow-moving, apathetic apocalypse of soullessness. This actually makes your task easier. Without the necessity of patching in a soul, there’s no need to consult the authorities on making this thing happen. You simply need to find some competently insane biophysicist and have him conduct an old-school reanimation on your cat’s corpse. Will your cat be the same Mowsers as you knew and loved before? Yes. Because when something undead dies and then gets back up again, their personality doesn’t change. They just have more rotted bits.

Alistair